Using Gmail: Send Mail From Another Addresses

This post is part of the series Using Gmail. Check out all the posts from this series here.

If you’re like most people, you probably have at least two email addresses (personal and work) if not more. It’s not too difficult to manage just two, but once you start adding a few more things can get harder to manage. Thankfully, there is a simple tool that makes your digital communications world simpler: Gmail.

There are way too many facets of Gmail to cover in just one blog post, so I’ll be spreading out these tips over a series of posts. Let’s just focus on one task today: setting up Gmail to send mail from another address.

There are a lot of reasons you might want to do this. For example, I want to be able to send and receive messages branded with this blog’s domain, but I don’t want to have to login to another account to do it. With Gmail, this is a somewhat simple task.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure the address you want to use is setup. You’ve probably already done this, but in my case I had to create a new email address.

2. Go to Gmail’s Accounts and Import settings page. See screenshot below if you get lost.

3. Click the “Send mail from another address” button. Pretty obvious, but again check the screenshot below if you need help.

4. Enter the name you want to use and the other email address. If you’re setting up a generic account, maybe an info/admin email, you could enter something else, but you’ll probably want to use your real name here.

5. Decide if you want to send the messages through Gmail or the other email’s servers. This is an important decision. It’s MUCH easier just to use Gmail, but if you do every message you send using the other address will display “From name@otheraddress.com on behalf of yourgmail@gmail.com.” This may not be ideal for you, so if you know how to setup SMTP servers you’ll want to choose the second option. See this help page from Google if you want more info on this.

6. Enter the confirmation code or click the link that Google sends your other address. This step is there just to make sure you don’t pick up an address you don’t really own, like president@whitehouse.gov or something less crafty.

Congrats!!! You can now send email using the other address right from within Gmail. To select the other address you’ll just click the drop-down list next to “From:” when you compose a new message.

How many email addresses do you actively use?